Mobile unmanned vehicles with autonomous capabilities are currently in development for land, water, and air applications in a variety of industries. These unmanned vehicles increasingly employ the ability to sense their surroundings to enable autonomous navigation and data collection. Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly tasked with performing surveillance and reconnaissance for security and disaster response, and United States regulations continue to codify the introduction of UAV drones into navigable civilian airspace for commercial and hobby purposes. The future of commercial drone usage may include dedicated airspace corridors and travel routes shared by vehicles of a variety of models; these corridors may be tightly regulated to enforce air speed and elevation limits. As the number of UAVs sharing the same travel corridors increases, greater vehicle density may contribute to complications related to higher traffic, such as impromptu slowdowns or collisions. Unmanned vehicles required to land in designated regions may find themselves competing for space with other units controlled by different operators. Dynamic systems comprised of several unmanned vehicles must be managed during deployment to ensure that appropriate group and individual behaviors, such as collision avoidance and inter-vehicle spacing, are exhibited, and that airspace regulations are complied with.
Some related art UAV autopilot systems were developed for specific applications using existing infrastructure. Crop-dusting UAVs follow predetermined lane segments over a field designated by a central control system, while self-driving car autopilots still follow static roadways. UAVs operating under “leader-follower” principles cannot set their own flight plans or modulate their speed and behavior in response to encounters with vehicles outside their swarm. A traffic control system that could scale with any number of vehicles would allow for a single solution for coordinating flight paths amongst different types and models of vehicles. An on-board UAV autopilot that can react to changes in traffic density while still abiding by limitations on speed and path dependencies can result in more efficient and safer travel corridors; this has the added benefit of obviating the need for a perpetually broadcasting centralized traffic controller. There exists a need for a method of managing automated vehicle traffic that is more safe, rapid, adaptable, and scalable while remaining platform-agnostic.
In addition to managing traffic for disparate vehicles, improvements in UAV autonomy are opening up new uses for multivehicle systems. It is anticipated that there will be an increasing need for lone operators to manage several UAV's at once. This will often occur where there is no substantial communication infrastructure, such as in a search and rescue or border surveillance operation, and/or where vehicles need to operate closely to each other, such as when they are returning to a delivery location. In these cases, there is a need for a portable traffic management solution.